


Hour of Lead

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s08e15 DeadAlive, Episode: s08e18 Vienen, Episode: s08e19 Alone, F/M, Post-Episode: s08e16 Three Words, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-07-29 13:43:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20083171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: She waits for him to remember that he loved her once.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There’s some second-person experimentation here, but it moves into limited third after a little bit. Hope y'all like pain. 😅

You are watching the person you love, who is somehow no longer dead. His chest moves up and down, with help at first, and then on its own. You are holding the weight of his child under your palm and wondering if it is okay to hope. _This child will not have a father to love him_, a thing you have been telling yourself for weeks, a thing you have been forcing yourself to acknowledge, may no longer be true.

_Will you open your eyes and know me?_ You think. _Will you see what we’ve done and smile like I did?_

You want to believe.

The chair is uncomfortable and your back hurts but you will not leave him because his chest is still moving. Moving again. On its own. This means that maybe your child will have a father and you won’t be flung into motherhood alone and with only half of your heart. You try to swallow these things into yourself, to believe them, to plant them in the black hole in your chest that exploded and collapsed like a dead star in Helena eight weeks ago—so they might regrow into some small pinprick of light.

_Please_, you think.

And then he moves—just a twitch of a finger. Then his head, and then his eyes and he is looking at you, joking at you and you are crying helplessly because it is _him_ and he _does_ know you. You cry onto his still-breathing chest and think how you will wait to show him your belly until he is stronger, so you can be sure he understands: you searched for him; you were strong for months; you kept yourself and his baby safe, in spite of everything. Here is the so much more he promised you both, waiting for him.

He falls back asleep, but you don’t let him go. It is hours before you allow yourself to rest in a nearby cot.

—

You don’t mean for it to happen, but he sees you, all of you, before you have a chance to tell him. The look on his face is such confusion, with eyes that reflect a deep, unexpected wounding.

“Oh,” you say, disappointed that it happened this way. You look down at the roundness of your middle. “I’m sorry. I wanted to wait a little longer to… show you.”

You look up again, expecting some kind of wonder or even some joy. You wait for him to ask questions, to reach his hand out to touch, to smile, to just look at your face, but he only frowns and turns away onto his side.

“Mulder,” you say, tentative, but he has closed his eyes and is pretending to sleep. You’re not sure what to do, so you sit back down on the cot. It’s not what you planned. It’s not how you thought it would be, having your partner back, your other half, and a father again for your child. You try to remember what he’s been through and you close your eyes, breathe deeply, because he probably only needs time.

You cling to this thought for days (_he needs time_; _he’s been through so much_) as he recovers and learns to be conscious again for more than a few minutes, to sit up, to walk. But he won’t make eye contact with you: he treats you like a stranger, or maybe something worse. He’s not the man who once told you he loved you and promised you miracles (_We’ll try again, we’ll adopt, I’ll marry you if you’ll let me_) and the so much more that he no longer seems to want, now that it is here. He’s forgotten those things, or they were taken from him on that ship.

You wait for him to remember that he loved you once, but you also try to prepare, again, to do this alone.

_+_

“Dana, please tell me what’s happening.”

A dust mote drifts in a beam of early-spring light that falls across the desk. She watches: holds her palm out to watch it disappear against her skin. “He’s back,” she says.

Margaret Scully is justifiably concerned about her daughter, who called to say only that her partner was no longer dead, and that he didn’t want to see her. “I went to his funeral. That’s not possible.”

Dana nods because it is true, an undeniable fact: people who are dead and buried do not return. She is still wearing the brown turtleneck she brought him back to his apartment in. He didn’t seem surprised that she’d kept the space—kept paying rent and feeding his fish (and sleeping on his mattress, but he would never know that, not if she could help it). She wonders if he’d have been angry—angrier—if she hadn’t, if she’d had to bring him here with her.

“It’s Easter next week,” Scully says, as if that’s what they were talking about. And then, “I have to go in to work early tomorrow.”

Maggie places herself in her daughter’s line of vision, perching on the edge of the desk to cup Dana’s face in her hands. “Tell me what happened.”

Her daughter meets her eyes: wet and blue and far away. “He wasn’t really dead. It was a virus that slowed his vitals. He… he came back, but he’s still not quite himself.”

“Is he still sick?”

“No.”

“Does he know about the baby? He must.”

The eyes lose focus even further, wander to the window and out over the street. “We’ll be fine.”

“You and Fox?”

Dana closes her eyes and breathes.

—

On the phone, Skinner tells her to meet him at Mulder’s apartment, that they all need to talk. She almost doesn’t come because talking doesn’t feel like something she can do right now. She lowers herself slowly onto his couch and tries to remember when was the last time, of so very many, that they sat this way: some other life of beer and bad movies and slow kisses.

Mulder wastes no time in reminding her that she is not strong anymore—that her body, their baby, has made her vulnerable and unable to do the work. He laughs, but it is at her and unkind: her hilarious betrayal of him. She will have _more important_ things to worry about soon. She alone.

Scully’s heart pounds and she looks away. When she tries to explain about Agent Doggett, she feels something disappear. The tether breaks, and she is lost, searching for bearings again. 

She floats. She puts on a suit. She develops a head cold and fails to make connections in the case they begin work on. (_See Scully? You were never good enough for the X-Files_.) She hears his phantom voice in her head, and then aloud saying just what she feared: _At least that’s the way it used to work_, he tells her, reminding her in case she forgot that he has always been, is still, the beating heart of the work that holds them together.

He calls it a _cause_, her desire to keep him alive.

She is spread too thin and coming apart. “I need to…” She tries to think of an excuse. “I left some things at, um… I have to go out. I’ll leave you the keys, okay?”

Mulder looks up from the computer. “Okay.”

She calls a cab and walks out into the night, not sure where she is going but thinking, for some reason, of the bench beside the reflecting pool where it is quiet and where he’d come back to her once before. The cool air in her lungs reminds her that she, too, is still breathing. But then Doggett appears, calling her name, and everything, everything unravels.

Skinner is the only one who’s seen or heard her cry since October—since the incident with the ship in Arizona when she steeled her spine and lowered the shutters on her heart. When he asks what’s wrong, she can barely get the words out because her chest feels like it is collapsing and she is holding onto Mulder’s sweater, the one she keeps in her closet, and squeezing it until her fingers are red. 

By the time Doggett finds her in the car, an hour later, she is calm and silent.

When Mulder doesn’t die again, when he comes back to her, angry at having failed, he asks her to drive him back to his apartment. The baby kicks hard, but she won’t touch her abdomen in front of him. She bites the inside of her cheek and drives him home without speaking. He is still finding his way, she thinks. He owes her nothing. It should be enough that his heart beats.

—

She surprises herself by smiling when he is kind, when he brings her a gift, or when he touches her belly after leaving her alone in the hospital for two days. She can’t stop these smiles—they emerge from her body’s memory of a time before, from the part of her that forgets he is different now. She reminds herself that he never agreed to this: that he promised her children because he thought he was dying, and not because he wanted to be a father. He says he will protect it, her baby, and she wants to scream. Instead she nods and looks away.

Now he lifts his chin toward her middle and says, “The kid all right?”

She tells him yes, but she has no other words and nothing else to give. He came to tell her he’s been fired, that he took the blame for the incident on the oil rig. He came to tell her these things because she wouldn’t meet him at the airport, because she turned off her phone and has brought home a briefcase of paperwork to catch up on, because looking at him and thinking about him hurts her, even as she craves, needs, aches for his face and his eyes and his hands.

“Scully.”

She is looking for the line where her signature goes, but the words have blurred and her ears ring. It is Mulder’s turn to sit awkwardly on her couch, now, in his jeans and leather jacket. She realizes he’s waiting for her to say something else, so she looks at the top button of his shirt and says, “I’m sorry you were fired.” He clears his throat. She turns back to her paperwork, where she still can’t find the signature line.

“I guess it was a long time coming,” he says, and the silence stretches like an ocean. Outside, a car honks. “You want me to help you put that together?”

He’s looking at the partially-unboxed crib that sits in pieces in the far corner, and Scully’s face feels suddenly hot. Her mother bought it for her, and she’d meant to finish it weeks ago, when she’d still been in the haze of solitary grief, moving mechanically through all her necessary tasks. In the last weeks, though, her solitude has felt sharp rather than hazy, and the thought of completing the two-person project alone is painful.

“No, it’s fine. I can do it.”

“Okay.”

He doesn’t take the hint. He’s still sitting on her couch.

“Scully,” he says again.

She closes her eyes and breathes through her nose. Sitting for long periods is uncomfortable, so she shifts to relieve the pressure at her hips. “Why are you here?” She asks.

His elbows are on his knees and he’s watching her discomfort. “You want me to go?”

“That’s not what I said.”

He sighs. “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

Like little needles, his words. “So you’ll settle for my company.”

That catches him off guard—she hears it in his hesitation. “What?” There’s another brief pause—Mulder shaking his head—in which she realizes they’re going to have to actually talk about it, and her heart sinks. She feels one of his fingers touch her knee. “Scully, what’s happening here?”

She opens her eyes, cold and blue and haunted by the last six months. She is at the top of the roller coaster, staring down the first long drop. “You said to tell the kid you went down swinging, but who was I supposed to say you were?” He has leaned toward her, but she is backing into the corner of the cushions. Her voice is quiet, rough, but it gains strength in her frustration, refined and intensified by hurt. “I had to prepare once already, you know. I already had to think how to explain what happened. I started a stupid scrapbook, which seems pointless now, because even if you die again, which you seem determined to do, now I know you didn’t really want us anyway. So what should I do? Scratch out _daddy_ and write ‘Mom’s work friend’? What am I supposed to do, Mulder? How am I supposed to be around you?”

He looks as if she’s slapped him. He is stunned silent, and the quiet grows until she breaks it again.

“I was ripped in half once already. I didn’t expect you to do it again on purpose.”

Scully feels used up entirely, emptied out. There is a twinge of guilt, even still, because she knows he is also confused and hurt and floundering in his post-death world. But she has run out of strength, she thinks, at last. Scully lets her head fall into her hands and listens to the sound of her own breathing. She feels his weight shift on the couch. A moment later, she hears her front door swing open, and then click shut.

For a long while, she doesn’t move from the couch, but she doesn’t let herself cry, either.


	2. Chapter 2

On the wall is a diagram showing the stages of cervical dilation. On the cabinet across from it, the one that holds bandages and tongue depressants and gauze, is another depicting the progress of fundal height by week. The sketched woman’s body is transparent. She is a hollow outline, backgrounded in favor of the brightly-colored ovals representing her womb. Scully tries to focus on her doctor.

“I’m worried, Dana.” The other woman’s fingers brush her elbow. “Not about the baby. The measurements are good and he’s active… but you haven’t gained much weight, which means you’re giving everything to hm. You need to take care of yourself.”

Scully nods, half-distracted. “I know.”

“What kind of support system do you have?” There’s a brief pause in which the doctor carefully avoids mentioning the child’s father. “Your mom, maybe?”

Another nod. “Yeah. Yes. I can talk to my mom. She’s not far.”

“Could she come stay with you? Help you get ready?”

“I…” She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

The other woman’s eyes are blue and concerned. She touches Scully’s shoulder this time, and it is strange to feel such kindness in the gesture, to feel any touch at all. She thinks of the last time Mulder touched her—just a tentative tap of his finger on her knee, like she were made of glass or fire that might cut or burn him. She is a ticking time bomb of danger and responsibility, a capsule ready to burst under the tongue of an imperiled spy.

“Well, you need to stop working at least,” the doctor says. “You’re two centimeters dilated and that baby is fully in position. You can’t be comfortable.”

At that, Scully almost smiles. “Feels like I’m sitting on his head most of the time.”

“You basically are, Dana. It could be any time now, so I need you to keep off your feet. Stop wearing heels, don’t do any autopsies, get some rest. And more food.” She leans down, holds eye contact for a moment. “Please. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. You’re on maternity leave, effective immediately.”

So Scully slips back into her heels, which she’ll have to give up, and back into her car, which she’ll have to stop driving, and takes herself home to her quiet apartment, feeling just a little bit like a scolded child, but also like she’d give anything to be held and taken care of until this baby comes—a break from holding everything together. Instead she gets out her tool box and drags the scattered pieces of the crib into the nursery.

It’s an hour before she’s almost in tears, trying to hold the two sides she’s assembled together so she can put the screws in place. Her arms aren’t long enough. Her belly is in the way. She tries three more times before she lets them clatter to the floor and slumps back against the wall.

Melvin Frohike finds her that way not long after. He pokes his head through the nursery door. “You rang?”

She tries to smile. Never in her life did she think she’d give this man a key to her apartment, but he’d been a surprising comfort in the months Mulder was missing. And dead. He’d brought her small tubs of ice cream and extra tissues, flowers, a pack of baby socks, pictures of Mulder to put in her scrapbook. He’d called her, drunk and sad, at least twice, and both times she’d found herself sniffling with him.

“Thanks for coming,” she says.

“Never let it be said I’m not handy. Where’s this go?” He lifts one of the crib sides and angles it near the other.

Scully hoists herself up, aligns the two pieces, and pulls a small Allen wrench from her pocket. “If you could just hold these, I can get this bolt in place.”

It’s quiet a moment while she works, setting the pieces then tightening the bolts. She doesn’t make eye contact, but she can feel him watching her.

“Okay, now this other side.”

Frohike lifts the large side piece she’s already assembled, holding it by its smooth wooden bars. “Scully,” he says.

“Hmm.”

“You’re here alone.”

Twist, twist, tighten. “I live alone.”

“You’re getting close to your due date, right? Shouldn’t someone be with you?”

She shrugs. “The doctor said someone should stay with me, but…” She leans her weight against the wrench, making sure the bolt is as tight as possible. “I can call my mom if I need to.”

She feels his eyes again and waits for it. She knows it’s coming. “Look, Scully, I know it’s none of my business. But where the hell is Mulder?”

She chuffs out a small laugh, but it’s dry, like ripping apart a fallen leaf. That was the question of the year, she supposed. Where was Mulder. “I don’t know,” she says. “At his apartment?”

“But you called me.”

“Yeah.” With three sides assembled, she drops in the slatted bottom and moves to collect the fourth side from its place against the wall. But as she stands, she finds her head swimming for a moment and her vision blurring.

“Hey, take it easy,” Frohike says. “You okay?”

She steadies herself. Nods.

“Sit. I’ll do the last side.”

She watches him for a moment, this little man who loves Mulder almost as much as she does. She passes him the Allen wrench on her way to the rocking chair in the corner. “Thanks.”

He makes quick work of the final piece. There is nothing to do now but lower the mattress into place. Frohike wiggles the corners, checking their sturdiness. “Solid,” he says, and then there is a quiet moment between them while she tries to come up with something to say.

“I don’t think Mulder… He’s still healing, I think. He needs time to adjust,” she says.

“He tell you that?”

She frowns. “When he first came back, he seemed so lost. He said he was having trouble processing everything, but I think he was angry.”

Frohike grunts.

She filters the details carefully. She doesn’t want a pity party. “He’s been doing better since, though. He brought a gift. He came over for pizza.”

“Friendly,” he says. She can se that something’s gnawing at him. He fidgets. He picks up the crib mattress from where it leans against the far wall. Then he says, “Bullshit,” and lowers it into the assembled frame.

The word hovers, sharp, in the air. He’s crossed his arms over his chest. Scully raises her eyebrow in question.

“Are you telling me that bastard got to come back from the grave and still chose to be a deadbeat dad?”

If his face were any hotter, his glasses might fog up, she thinks. She lets the words sink in. Is that what Mulder is? Too enamored of the world to be tied down by domesticity, he’d rather seek the truth alone? Scully rocks in the chair and looks toward the window. “No, it’s not like that.”

“It’s not?”

“He thought he was dying, and now he’s not. I don’t think he ever would have chosen me over his work, if…” She sighs. “I don’t think he’s ever wanted a child. And this,” she tilts her chin toward her middle, “has made me seem different to him, selfish, maybe, because I can’t do the same kind of work I did before. It… it’s not his fault. I can’t force him to want us.”

The room falls silent as Frohike considers this. She watches him clench his fist once, twice, and then he’s shaking his head. “That sonofabitch.”

—

It’s getting late and she’s drifting toward a dream, head slumped on a couch cushion. There’s a child in the dream that she can almost see, with light brown hair and hazel eyes. A baby, fat and smiling and reaching for her nose. She knows its face, has held it in her mind it a thousand times in sleep. The child moves, and suddenly it is a boy: mischief in those same eyes that turns, without warning, to sorrow. She knows those heavy lids, too, but in her waking life. They plead, contrite. _I know you_, she thinks.

And then the phone is ringing and she pulls her own eyes open to reveal her empty living room. It’s only her in the apartment, and the digital ring of her cordless phone, which sits just far enough away that she must strain over her own bulk to reach it.

“Hello?”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

It’s him. Of course it’s him. “Mulder?”

“I said I’d help you put it together.”

The crib. Frohike had been angry when he left, and she had no doubt he’d had words with Fox Mulder. “You didn’t need to. It’s okay.”

“Damnit, Scully, I want to help.”

“Why?”

“Because… I care about you.”

Little knives, little knives. “We’re fine, Mulder.”

There’s a sound that’s something like a laugh on the other end of the line. “I’m sure you are, but I’m worried,” he said. “Please. What can I do to help?”

Everyone so worried all the time, but what has she ever shown them but strength? She can do this alone. He doesn’t owe her anything. She wants to tell Mulder that if he wants to be useful, he could love her again. He could acknowledge his child, could remember that he told her he wanted this once.

“I have this class,” she says instead. “It’s a birthing class, and I should have done it weeks ago, but…” but you were dead and then alive again and I felt too alone to imagine being a mother. “I’m supposed to come with a partner, but my mom is busy.”

“When is it?

“Tomorrow? My doctor told me to stop working, so I’m … I’m going to get my things from the office in the morning.”

“Because your due date is…”

“The seventeenth.”

There’s a moment, a pause. “That’s this week.”

“Yeah.”

She wonders if he’s doing the math, if he’s counting the months and weeks and trying to piece together memories. Part of her wants to be angry that he hasn’t asked her due date before now, when he’s been home for weeks. Does he realize how those dates line up, she wonders? In August he’d made wishes to a genie and then taken her to see his family’s summer house where they’d loved each other from the attic to the dunes, until their muscles were rubber and their bones were tired.

Funny, she thinks, that he hadn’t wished away his disease. The thought stirs some curiosity in her, some small doubt that she files away for later.

“You shouldn’t be alone, Scully.”

She wants to laugh. She rests her head on her palm, elbow against her rounded belly. “Probably not.”

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

Something catches in her throat, and she must swallow it before she can talk. “Mulder, don’t offer me things I can’t really have. Don’t do that.”

She hears fabric against fabric on his end of the line as he shifts, and then the silence stretches for a moment. “What time tomorrow?”

She is balancing her heartache and her hope. She is slowly constructing the armor that will let her face him in a matter of hours. “Could you come at ten?”

“Okay,” he says.

Before she can say anything else, he hangs up.

—

He’s never watched Oprah in his life, of this she’s certain, which means he’s been reading baby books. The thought makes her feel like she’s swallowed hot rocks. She pictures him standing in a bookstore, looking confused, thinking about her and picking through books on pregnancy and birth. It is a dangerous thought that fuels a dangerous hope, so she locks the image away.

Scully _is_ concerned about Agent Doggett: she doesn’t like the idea of him alone out there. But her anxiety about leaving work is fueled more by the sense that she’s just done exactly what Mulder has expected of her all along—that she’s quit, that she’s finally given up on the work. He tells her she’s paid her dues to the X-Files, and she wonders if he’s always thought of her relationship to the work as transactional. How much was her abduction worth? Her cancer? A gunshot wound to the gut? Infertility treatments?

Today he is all smiles and lighthearted references to the baby. At the birthing class, he seems neither surprised nor disgusted by anything the nurse says: more points in favor of her Mulder-has-purchased-baby-books theory. The nurse uses language like “dads and partners,” and Scully wonders which, if either, he is now. He helps her kneel on the pillow so she can stretch out on all fours. He presses her hips, as instructed, and it’s the most intimacy she’s felt from him since the night he left for Oregon. Her face flushes involuntarily and her heart quickens. When he helps her to stand, he holds her arms, then brushes his fingers against her middle.

“Okay?” He asks, but she’s not sure she can breathe to answer.

The baby answers instead, moving against his fingers, disturbed by the commotion and probably her rapid heartbeat. Mulder looks startled. She touches his hand before he can pull it away and holds it against the tiny limb that presses outward. The expression on his face is worth the slamming of her heart in her chest and the terror that he will withdraw.

“What is that?” He asks, ignoring the nurse who has asked them to move into a new position.

“A knee, I think.”

Mulder shakes his head: here is the wonder she’d looked for in those first days, turning his lips up and his eyes to hers. She smiles at him—they are smiling at each other in a moment she didn’t think possible.

“Dana? You okay?” The nurse checks in and the moment breaks. He pulls his hand away and looks at the floor.

“Fine,” she says, rubbing her abdomen. “Just some acrobatics.” And she moves to sit as the others are doing, stretching her legs, shifting her hips and thinking about the baby moving _down down and out into the world_.

After, he buys her lunch from a sandwich shop and watches to make sure she eats. “I want to know what it’s been like for you,” he says. “Were you sick in the beginning?”

She stops chewing, and the food feels heavy in her mouth. When she manages to swallow, she says, “Yeah, some. I was tired and dizzy… remember Oregon?”

“That was… because you were pregnant.” She watches him realize what she had figured out months ago. Suddenly he seems less hungry.

“It got worse after that, and then right when it started to get better… well, everything was worse. If I’m being honest, I don’t even remember the middle very well.”

“But you made a scrapbook.”

She looks at him. “Yeah. I did.”

He nods and takes a sip of his soda. “I don’t want you to be alone anymore. I’ll drop you off, and then I’m going to pack some things and come back. I’ll sleep on the couch if you want, but I won’t let you be alone.”

Scully’s stares at her sandwich, face growing hot, hope and fear of disappointment at war. He is being overprotective, maybe. He’s worried about her. He’ll stay until the baby comes, sure, help them get settled, and then head back to his apartment with his fish and his singular quest. Even if that’s true, can she say no to his company? Could she ever reject the near proximity of Fox Mulder?

“Okay,” she says.

Quiet falls between them as they whittle small bites away from their turkey clubs, eyes carefully not meeting. It’s long minutes, a humming tension, before he breaks it:

“I still love you, you know,” he says.

Scully stops breathing, until her lungs hurt and she remembers to inhale. She doesn’t answer, she can’t, but her eyes sting and she manages a small nod.


	3. Chapter 3

Mulder seeks her out in the forensics lab, toting his visitor’s badge, and she is not entirely surprised to see him. He’d said he would come back to her apartment, and she can only imagine what he thought when he found the hasty note on her dining room table: _Doggett missing; gone to forensics lab to help however I can_.

He seems to want her to go home, but there is also that pride in his eyes when she tells him it’s an X-File, that the work still needs her. He tells her he’ll go look for Doggett in the morning, that she can check on the lab work later, and she wants to dig in her heels because how else will he know that she hasn’t given up? That she never once gave up?

“I’m okay,” she says. “Really, I’ve been sitting down every few minutes.”

“Come home,” he says.

His pleading eyes convince her, and the word _home_ coming from his mouth, which makes her chest tighten. She gives her second swab to the lab tech and asks her to put away the body until tomorrow.

“I’ll come back to check the results first thing.”

“Hmm,” Mulder says. He touches the back of her shoulder to usher her toward the door.

“Scrubs.” Scully gestures to her clothes, and he nods and waits for her to change.

In the car she wonders if he is tense, but she has trouble reading him now. “I’m sorry about the note,” she says. “I couldn’t just sit there.”

“You _need_ to just sit there.” His hand fidgets the steering wheel. “Scully, you need to rest. You’ve been out three times today already.”

“I feel fine,” she says, but it’s something of a lie. Her back hurts and it feels like the baby’s head is shoving her cervix down between her legs.

Mulder looks over at her, scrutinizing, and then back at the road. He is quiet for a minute, thinking, and then his voice is soft. “Were you like this the whole time? Did you put yourself in danger?”

The words take a moment to sink in, but then a spark of anger lights in her. Damn him, she thinks, for using his profiler’s mind on this and nothing else, for finding a way to make her feel guilty for both doing too much and too little. “I did what I had to do,” she says. “And it wasn’t always me… putting myself in danger.”

He seems to think about this for a moment. “But you were sometimes. In danger.”

She bites at the inside of her cheek. “Yes.”

She watches his fingers tighten on the steering wheel. “You could have… what if you’d been hurt and lost the baby?”

He is digging around inside her for the infected tissue, but his words are a blunt instrument. They bruise as they seek. It feels like a test, his question. It feels like he wants something from her. But she is too tired and she has only the truth to give him. “I’d have thought…” she closes her eyes. “I’d have thought it a just punishment, I think. What I deserved.”

“For what?”

“For failing you.”

She waits for some explosion, some reaction, but nothing follows. They are rounding the last corner before her street. Mulder is quiet as he parks, helps her out of the car, follows her inside.

“Sit,” he says, gesturing to the couch. She does, watching him pace awkwardly for a moment, scratch the back of his head, before sitting to face her on the coffee table. Their knees almost touch. “I meant what I said before.” He reaches out and takes one of her hands, searching her face. “I do still love you. And I need you to be more careful.”

She can feel the frown forming on her face, even as her heart beats faster. His fingers are warm and the electricity between them is strong as it ever was, but there is hesitation yet in his manner and his words: a hanging negation, a silent conditional. “What about you?” She asks. “Why don’t you need to be more careful?”

His jaw clenches, and then he tries to conjure a smile for her but does not succeed. “Rest,” he says. “I’ll make dinner.” He touches her shoulder on the way to the kitchen.

She listens, as he works, to the sound of a pan set on the counter, the refrigerator door opening and closing, the _click click whoosh_ of her gas range coming to life. Then she is opening her eyes as he brushes her cheek and sets a plate in front of her: salad and chicken and crusty bread with butter. She’d fallen asleep.

“Thank you,” she says.

They sit together in silence. She feels him watching her eat. For a moment, she’s able to pretend that it is Before and they are just eating after work and things are normal.

“The Gila monster is venomous,” he says after a while. “It produces venom in the saliva and delivers it through chewing.”

She takes a sip of water. “Not native to the east coast, though. And there were no bites on the victim, so no chewing.”

Mulder shrugs. “Not native, but maybe someone brought some in to extract their venom and experiment with it. We should check with herpetologists in the West Seneca area.”

_We_, she thinks, and almost smiles. “Okay,” because she is still playing this game in which they are Agents Mulder and Scully of the X-Files division, continuing their shop-talk over dinner. When they finish, he’ll follow her toward the bedroom where they’ll change into pajamas and brush their teeth and wash their faces and climb under the cool sheets and find each other’s skin amidst the cotton. He’ll bury his face in that part of her neck that makes her shiver and she’ll whimper and press her body to his. It will be quiet and sweet, their lovemaking, because it is a work night and they are tired. They will fall asleep entwined, and she’ll wake with his arm heavy on her ribs and his erection pressed to her back. She can almost feel it now, and it makes her _want_. She puts down her plate and looks at him, the pull in her chest overwhelming.

“What?” He asks around a bite of salad.

“I miss you,” she says. Present tense.

He chews slowly and swallows. “I’m right here,” he says.

But she shakes her head. 

They finish in quiet, the spell broken.

—

Two o’clock in the morning and she needs to pee. She climbs from the bed, with no small effort, and to the bathroom. She emerges toward the blue flicker from the television: he’s awake on the couch.

“Mulder?”

He cranes his head over the pillows to see her. “Hey.”

“Why are you awake?”

A shrug. “Thinkin.”

She crosses her arms over her chest and takes a few steps closer. “About what?”

He shakes his head and pats the seat beside him. “Doesn’t matter.”

She hesitates, caught between returning to bed and his invitation. She’s afraid of her own neediness at this hour, but approaches anyway, lowers herself to sit. Now is the quiet time when they are fully alone. They know this dark lull, these easily forgotten hours. They have found respite here before. His arms come around her and she breathes deep, needing so badly the pressure of his body on hers. He pulls her against him, presses his face to the back of her shoulder.

“I need you to be okay,” he says into the fabric of her pajamas. “That’s all that matters to me right now.”

She cups his forearm in her palm, knowing so well the warm solidity of its muscle, the soft hairs. There is something he’s holding back, as always keeping his secret knowledge. “I’m okay,” she says. “We’re all okay.”

He’s quiet, stewing in whatever it is he won’t tell her.

“Mulder,” she says. “Is it… it’s that you don’t want this, isn’t it?” This baby. This family. This version of her. He’d told her, once, that he did. But that was when it seemed impossible, when it wasn’t real.

A sound against her back, like a whimper or a soft cry, and his arms tighten. His words are still muffled because he won’t lift his head. “I do,” he says. “I want it. I just wish…”

She tugs his arm, tries to get him to look at her. She keeps her voice low, as if a whisper won’t scare away his answer. “What?”

He shakes his head. “I wish I could know this baby was…” but he doesn’t finish. Can’t.

In the silence he leaves behind, she hears what he didn’t say: _mine_. Ice in her veins, then, she realizes why. She understands his distance, his reluctance. He thinks the baby isn’t his. He thinks, maybe, that it is a monster, and he doesn’t want to frighten her.

Though her limbs seem filled with lead, she stands, leaving him reaching for her.

“Scully,” he says: an apology.

“You might be afraid to get too close, Mulder, but I don’t have a choice.” She touches her belly, rubs it as if to reassure the child that it is wanted. “I’ve had to… I have to believe this child is yours. I have to.”

He looks ill; the pain carved onto his face is visceral and haunted. She goes back to her bed and does not invite him.

_+_

Even your mother isn’t safe, can’t be trusted. It isn’t her fault, you try to think.

Mulder is on fire. He’s pulled taught like the skin of a drum. He stays to see that you are not dying, have not been poisoned, and then he is off with Skinner and you are alone again, just your blubbering apologetic mother holding you tight in the sterile room. She is the only one left to bring you home. You try not to be angry.

You cannot trust your own mother.

You cannot trust yourself.

Mulder is gone, smashing things to find the truth.

You can’t do this. You can’t live like this.

You are shoved into cars and told your baby is from some experiment, or from God, but not from love. You are passed around like a thing, then shoved into another car to be taken away without him again.

_Scully’s baby…_

_This child you’re carrying…_

He’d put as much verbal distance as he could between himself and your child because he still refuses to acknowledge that it could be his.

Mulder lets you go. He puts you in a car with an almost-stranger to have “this baby” without him. He absolves himself of fatherhood again and again.

He doesn’t say goodbye.

He doesn’t say he loves you.

You could die, will probably die.

You are in the moving car, passing houses and families and people living lives with their children and their dogs, even now, and he is not even beside you anymore.

There is nothing else to be done, so you sleep.

—

Things happen in Georgia. Things happened. Bad things. You cannot touch them with your mind without breaking apart.

—

In the hospital he holds the baby by the window, bounces, kisses it, runs his finger down the tiny nose. He turns to you comfortable, smiling, like he has done this one-hundred times: held his child in the morning light, waiting for you to wake.

“There’s mom,” he says to the bundle.

You sit up carefully and reach for your baby without thinking. How did you get here? What has your memory blocked to allow you this consciousness at all?

The child you recognize with an instinctive pull. The child you must have, must hold against your breast in this still-unfamiliar act. Mulder watches, unashamed, while you check the infant’s latch and feel the strong tug of his mouth. The skin at his still-reddened temple, his wrinkled forehead, his cheek as he eats—they are beyond any softness you’ve ever known.

“The doctor said she wants to keep you one more full day, so we can leave tomorrow. Your mom is already on her way. I told her to wait, but she wouldn’t, wants to see him right away.”

You wonder what your mother will think. You wonder if she will be angry about the way this happened.

“The nurses showed me how to change him while you were sleeping. They said we have to cover him with a cloth while we do it, or he’ll pee on us.”

You smile some. Your insides warm at the thought of Mulder taking instruction from the nurse, listening carefully as she probably called him _dad_ and showed him how to slide the new diaper under the old, how to fasten the tabs. For a moment, your heart feels full.

When you swap the baby to the other breast, Mulder slides in behind you on the bed and his arm comes around your shoulders. “Are you okay?” He asks.

“Yeah,” you say. “Yes. Just… a little dazed, I think.”

He presses his lips to your temple. “You did so well,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.”

You won’t let yourself think about that night, about the terror that has marked every single milestone of this pregnancy and birth, but your breathing changes anyway. Your heart speeds and you feel your fingers tremble under the warm weight of the baby.

“Mul—“ but you can’t even finish his name and suddenly the room is blurry through your tears and slipping vision. You are woozy with the speed that blood moves through your veins.

He brings both arms around you now, his face buried in your neck. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You’re okay. We’re all okay.”

He doesn’t let you faint while holding the baby, and for that you are grateful.

You are three in the bed, you think, an entire newborn nuclear family. The baby drifts, and you drift, but you are held up by the third. Three, oh, it’s a magic number.

—

He stays for a week, and then two, but you are still bleeding when he leaves. You are milk-sore and tired and waking too often sweaty and this isn’t how you thought you’d have to say goodbye. Your apartment fills with his things, paradoxically, as he removes himself from your life. He holds William constantly and tells you he is sorry, so sorry.

You look for the pieces of your armor, but they are in tatters, crushed like egg shells under a heavy boot. You must mother alone, after all, and still raw. You are not even supposed to use stairs yet. Or drive. You feel all the time that someone is standing on your chest.

He holds you while the baby sleeps and whispers into your hair. “I don’t want to go.”

You are shaking with the terrible truth of it. “Don’t,” you say. “You can’t. I knew this would happen somehow, but you can’t. I’ll die, Mulder.” You shake. You can’t breathe. Your breasts hurt and your cunt hurts and your heart is so bruised you think it will soon give up all together.

“You said I had to,” he says. “You said _What if they hurt him?_”

You splinter. You crack. You cannot hold either of them apart from you, but neither can you hold them together, and the broken law of noncontradiction shatters the core of your rational self.

“What if…” but nothing follows. There is nothing else: no certainty, only a series of escalating, increasingly horrible _what ifs_. He kisses you again, a full kiss with both palms on your cheeks, but between his skin and yours there are tears.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I love you,” and then, “I’ll go tomorrow.”

It is like a blow that makes your ears ring, a car crash that rips your perception from the world, a numbing buffer between your senses and surroundings that will protect you from ripping crashing searing pain. You wait and wait and wait, but the numbness lingers. It stays for months.

Your greatest fear, and one that has borne out over and over, is that he would, and did, choose heroic martyrdom over you. In the end you are not enough to make him choose the subtler fight, the one of minor action and unremarkable bravery and holding the joy of small moments against the swallowing dark. In the end he chooses the blind, grand thrust of his sword against unseen forces and you are left, like the abandoned women of yore, with spit-up on your blouse, an empty heart, the weight of a thousand future days alone.

You think you should have known: he was never intended to father. That was never his verb.

— end —

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the pain. I know a lot of folks wanted a happy ending for this, but the truth is that Scully did not get one, and neither did Mulder. At least not in this story arc. Canon is terrible and traumatic and cruel, and I guess I wanted to explore that a little more closely.


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